Friday, May 31, 2013

Sociology without class analysis is like physics without
calculus: it always entails a primitive regression to magical and occult forces. I’m
thinking here of Elizabeth Kolbert’s article about spoiled American children inthe New Yorker, which has bits in it like: “The books [about disciplining
children] are less how-to guides than how-not-to’s: how not to give in to your
toddler, how not to intervene whenever your teen-ager looks bored, how not to
spend two hundred thousand dollars on tuition only to find your
twenty-something graduate back at home, drinking all your beer.”

The last, of course, is the kicker – we are firmly in the
territory of the top ten percent. The “you”, the “we”, these marks that seal
the unsealable class divisions that now, more than ever, have appeared on the
surface of every developed economy in the world – these interest me. This is
not just the usual ideological brainwashing, the disguising of those divisions –
this is a step further in magic thinking. The we is used to make those
divisions disappear. The nudgery liberalism of the Obama era started out with
the desire from bipartisanship that, in effect, was the objective correlative
of the magic thinking of the upper class, which not only wants to change the
lifestyles of the no doubt racist, sexist, homophobic proles, but also wants
not to hear tiresome tales of increasing poverty, precariousness, and all the
rest of what goes into what is really happening in the quicksand of everyday
life for the vast majority of people.

Kolbert is not a stupid writer, and she has written some very
good things about environmental issues, but she seems incorrigibly bound by her
presumed you and we – identifying with the presumed readership of the New
Yorker, who worry about what prep school to send the kids to. Her article
contrasts the behavior of one six year old of the “Matsigenka, a tribe of about
twelve thousand people who live in the Peruvian Amazon” with the
children of thirty Los Angeles households being studied by another
anthropologist, Elinor Ochs. In the maddening style of New Yorker’s premier purveyor
of sociology-lite, Malcolm Gladwell, the data is given as though every fact was
impenetrable to criticism and to history. Sociology-lite loves these atomic
givens, upon which they immediately build a sort of theme of the moment. The
theme of the moment – spoiled children – is a hotter issue now than ever
before, given the royal fucking distributed to the children in the advanced
economies at the moment – the fifty percent unemployment among the 17 to 30
crowd in the austerity ravaged lands of Spain, Portugal, Greece, Cyprus – and in
the U.S., where Demos put out a report last year about the state of all those “beerdrinking” young college grads that “you” casually forked over 200 thou for:

“Young
adults gained little ground in 2012.

Altogether, there are more than 5.6
million 18 to 34-year-olds who are willing and able to take a job and actively
looking for work, but shut out of opportunities for employment. These young
adults compose 45 percent of all unemployed Americans. An additional 4.7
million young people were underemployed—either working part time when they
really wanted full-time positions or marginalized from the labor market
altogether. Last year, the unemployment and underemployment rates for people
under 25 were more than double those for workers over 35.

Young
African American and Hispanic workers face higher unemployment and
underemployment than white workers in their age groups.

Young adult Hispanic workers
experience unemployment rates 25 percent higher than those of whites, while
African Americans face rates approximately double. One in four African
Americans between ages 18 and 24 is looking for a job but cannot find one, as
are more than one in seven Hispanic young adults.”

About Me

MANY YEARS LATER as he faced the firing squad, Roger Gathman was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover
ice. Or rather, to discover the profit making potential of selling bags of ice to picnicking Atlantans, the most glorious of the old man's Get Rich schemes, the one that devoured the most energy, the one that seemed so rational for a time, the one that, like all the others - the farm, the housebuilding business, the plastic sign business, chimney cleaning, well drilling, candy machine renting - was drawn by an inexorable black hole that opened up between skill and lack of business sense, imagination and macro-economics, to blow a huge hole in the family savings account. But before discovering the ice machine at 12, Roger had discovered many other things - for instance, he had a distinct memory of learning how to tie his shoes. It was in the big colonial, a house in the Syracuse metro area that had been built to sell and that stubbornly wouldn't - hence, the family had moved into it. He remembered bending over the shoes, he remembered that clumsy feeling in his hands - clumsiness, for the first time, had a habitation, it was made up of this obscure machine, the shoe, and it presaged a lifetime of struggle with machine after machine.